The blog post compared the growth in solar and wind in 2014 to the average growth in total primary energy consumption averaged over the last decade. I argued that one data point was not a good way to judge a “revolution”, much less discern a trend.

Trying to be proactive, rather than argumentative, I produced the data I thought should be in the post from the same data source.

Before 2005, effectively none of the growth in energy use in China was being met by new wind and solar generation. In 2013, about 12 percent of the growth was provided by new wind and solar resources. In 2014, that figure was about 11.5 percent. So the share of China’s growing energy consumption that is provided by new wind and solar is definitely increasing, and hence so is total wind and solar production as a share of total consumption (1.4 percent in 2014 according to BP).

Here’s another way to look at it: in 2000, wind and solar production in China was basically zero. In 2014, production from wind and solar sources in China was more than the total annual energy consumption of twenty six countries listed in BP’s data book (including developed countries like Kuwait, Austria, Switzerland, New Zealand and Denmark). So the solar and wind generators in China can now provide the equivalent of all the energy (including equivalent of fuels for transportation and heating, not just electricity) required to power a small, modern western European country.

Is this a “revolution”? I’ll leave that to others. I’d say the growth of solar and wind production in China is very, very strong. Of course, the growth in total energy consumption in China is very, very strong also.

Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electric utility, has filed their 2016-2030 Resource Plan with the Public Utilities Commission. This begins a long process of commenting and modification until their plan is approved by that body (which can take years). The Resource Plan details what trends in usage Xcel expects, and what resources (like new power plants, etc) are needed to meet that demand. The plan is important because it identifies the infrastructure investments the utility will need to make, and also the resulting environmental performance, among many other details.

I’m slowly making my way through it, both for professional and personal interest, and hope to highlight some thoughts for you, my dozens of readers.

There are a lot of things to like in the plan, the first being that Xcel is planning to meet State greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals within their own system. This is unlike the previous plan, which showed emissions increasing between 2015 and 2030. The chart below, from Appendix D, compares the two plans. (State goals include a reduction of 15 percent by 2015, 30 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050)

Most of the planned reductions in carbon pollution come from the addition of renewable energy resources to their system, as the chart below shows. By 2030, Xcel plans for 35 percent of their energy portfolio to be renewables.

However, I think the plan’s assumptions about the future cost of the solar portion of those renewables is probably too high.

Xcel plans to add over 1,800 MW of utility-scale solar to their system by 2030 (up from basically zero in 2015). This is a significant increase from the “reference case”, a ten-fold increase in fact. However, this slide was presented at a public meeting at the Public Utilities Commission:

As solar technology is still not fully mature, and costs are expected to decline and conversion efficiency to improve, it was assumed that the $95/MWh price holds throughout the study period. In effect, the assumption is that fundamental cost driver improvements will offset inflation.

So the rate of decrease in solar prices will match the inflation rate? Many sources have documented the dramatic decline in solar PV prices over recent years. Lazard seems to be an oft-cited source, and their 2014 Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis shows the price of energy from solar has dropped 78% since 2009. According to usinflationcalculator.com, the cumulative rate of inflation between 2009 and 2014 was about 10%. So, at least looking historically, this seems way off.

Of course, current precipitous declines probably won’t continue forever (most of the cost is now not modules). NREL says costs have been dropping on average 6 to 8 percent per year since 1998. If we assume just half of that decline per year (4 percent), solar energy would be around $51 per MWh in 2030. Using some very back-of-envelope calculations, a price difference of $46 per MWh in 2030 means costs for new solar energy shown in the Plan’s “Preferred Plan” scenario could be over-estimated by $97 million.

This is significant not just because the price estimates of the Preferred Plan may be too high. In preparing the plan, Xcel also ran seemingly dozens of other scenarios, some including CO2 reductions of over 50% in 2030 (compared with 2005). The price difference, according to Xcel, between the Preferred Plan scenario and the scenario with the largest CO2 benefit is $172 million (from Appendix J). These other scenarios which seem too costly may actually be more in line with what Xcel is currently asking to spend once dropping technology costs are factored in.

In an area that has seen its fair share of roadwork during the past few years, city officials want to raise West Avenue between 1½ to 2 feet during the next few years in an effort to prepare one of the lowest-lying points of Miami Beach for anticipated sea level rise.

Raising the road would be tied to stormwater drainage and sewer improvements that include installing more pumps to prevent flooding from rain and high tides. The first phase, which will likely begin in February, involves work on West Avenue from Fifth to Eighth streets and from Lincoln Road to 17th Street. This phase would last until August.

The West Avenue Neighborhood Association met Wednesday night with city officials to discuss the plans. Public Works director Eric Carpenter told the packed room of about 100 residents — some skeptical and some more in favor of the plan — that he prefers dovetailing the street raising with the underground infrastructure work rather than tearing up the street several times.

“It doesn’t really make any sense to disturb those segments of the street twice,” he said. “We’re moving forward with the stormwater improvements. What we’re trying to do now is get a consensus from the community that we want to move forward with everything else on that street so that we don’t have to come back later and tear it up again.”

With a higher road, the city would create transitions from the road to the sidewalk that include, depending on the property, a higher sidewalk, steps down to the sidewalk and/or extra drainage components to ensure that no water from the street is draining onto private property.

The first phase of the project will cost $15 million. A few reflections on this:

What about the buildings?

Local government officials would have a much steeper political hill to climb to spend $15 million on climate mitigation (emissions reduction) work.

I predict the costs of (attempting to) adapt to climate change will mostly be borne locally, be largely uncounted at the macro scale (and thus make mitigation seem expensive in comparison), and will often turn out to be a waste of money (since they won’t work for very long). I hope I’m wrong.

My latest at streets.mn does the carbon accounting which should have been part of the Draft 2040 Transportation Policy Plan developed by the Met Council.

Thrive MSP 2040, the new regional plan for the 7-county metro adopted by the Metropolitan Council, includes moderately strong language about addressing climate change. But the main implementation tool we’ve seen so far from the Council, the Draft 2040 Transportation Policy Plan, doesn’t go nearly far enough. In fact, it doesn’t even start where it should, with a baseline of emissions.

In this and future posts, I’ll try to do what I think the Draft Transportation Policy Plan should have done – identify where we’re starting from and where we need to go in terms of transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Boston, New York City, Denver, Cambridge and other cities have created solar potential maps to help their residents understand that solar photovoltaic systems are viable in dense urban areas, and to demonstrate the potential that exists on rooftops.

Of course, I had to try this myself.

Minnesota produces LiDAR data, which is basically micro-scale elevation data produced by flying a plane back and forth in a grid and shooting the ground with lasers a bajillion times. Skilled/obsessive GIS users can clean from this data information that can be used to make a fairly accurate model of everything on the ground (buildings, trees, etc). GIS software also makes it easy to produce daily, monthly or annual solar insolation maps. By taking the position of the buildings and trees, knowing the latitude, and projecting how the sun moves across the sky throughout the year, the software calculates a total amount of solar radiation that will hit a point after shading, angle and other factors are taken into account.

Solar insolation in January

After much tinkering, the Kingfield Solar Energy Potential map was born. The extreme density of the LiDAR data limits how large an area I could process (there were 4.9 million individual data points in this one small section of Minneapolis), but you get the idea. This map shows the area of each roof that might be appropriate for solar, how many panels could fit in that area, and an estimate of the annual production from those panels.

The Kingfield Solar Map

Some roofs are wholly inappropriate for solar, whether due to tree or building shading, orientation or size. But there is significant potential. If solar was installed on every appropriate piece of roof in this one-quarter square mile area, it would produce an estimated 2.2 megawatt hours of electricity each year, and avoid 2.9 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.

Our region certainly can’t address this issue alone, but we have a responsibility to do our part. The science also says we can’t wait another ten years to start addressing the problem. However, as this plan is currently written, the specifics on climate response are too ambiguous, and risk being watered down during implementation.The regional plan is one of the state’s most significant pieces of land use and transportation policy. By fully embracing state goals and calling for strong response, this could be a document that makes Minnesota a national leader in climate change response.

Old news, but still worth posting. In October, Xcel Energy filed a report with the Public Utilities Commission defending the cost overruns of upgrading the nuclear power plant in Monticello. Via the Star Tribune:

Xcel filed the report in response to the state Public Utilities Commission’s pledge in August to investigate the Monticello investment. The company said that even with the cost overruns, the project benefits customers — saving an estimated $174 million through the remaining 16 years of its license.

Yet that cost-benefit number relies on a “social cost” comparison between keeping the nuclear plant, which emits no greenhouse gases, vs. generating electricity from a plant that does emit them. State law says utility regulators should consider the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, though they’re not currently regulated. Without carbon-emissions savings, the Monticello upgrade would be a losing proposition, costing customers $303 million extra over its life, according to Xcel’s filing.

In interviews, Xcel executives defended the investment, saying they would make the same decision today, even though the utility world has changed since 2008, when the project began. Natural gas, now a favored fuel for power plants, is low-priced thanks to the fracking boom. And electricity demand has lagged since the recession, dampening the need for new plants.

“If we didn’t have our nuclear plants, we would be taking a big step backward in terms of our CO2 accomplishments,” said Laura McCarten, an Xcel regional vice president.

If you dig into the dockets (CI-13-754), you can find that Xcel’s modeling assumptions include a price on carbon of $21.50 per metric ton starting in 2017.

Regardless of your feelings about nuclear power, a utility stating that the externalities of carbon should be priced when making energy planning/financing decisions is significant. The use of a ‘social cost of carbon’ (SCC) metric at the federal level has (not shockingly) been the point of some contention. The Office of Management and Budget’s SCC is $35/mt in 2015 versus Xcel’s $21 in 2017.

Theoretically, we should start to see this figure or something similar used in all future energy planning decisions (Sherco, cough, cough) in Minnesota. Unless of course, Xcel was only being selective in order to justify recovering this very large expense (and spare the shareholders).

It would be an interesting exercise to apply this Minnesota SCC to land use and transportation infrastructure and planning decisions.

Frankly, we cannot afford to waste more time in a state of denial, saying that maybe this time our national leaders will wake up and take the problem seriously. We need to look for leadership and solutions elsewhere.

More importantly, we need to match our climate solutions to situations where leadership is still effective. We need to find targeted, strategic opportunities to reduce emissions, matching solutions to effective leadership.

But just where are those targeted opportunities?

In the search for effective climate solutions, we need to look for what I call “planet levers”: Places where relatively focused efforts, targeted the right way, can translate into big outcomes. Just like a real lever, the trick is to apply the right amount of force in just the right place, with little opposition.

In the search for planet levers to address climate change, we should look for ways to significantly cut emissions that don’t require grand policy solutions, such as carbon taxes or global cap-and-trade schemes, or the approval of the U.S. Congress or the United Nations. We need practical solutions to substantially cut emissions that work with a handful of nimble actors — including a few key nations, states, cities and companies — to get started.

…

Focusing on cities presents a particularly good set of levers to address climate change. Cities represent a nexus point of critical infrastructure — for electricity, communications, heating and cooling, and transportation — that are already in desperate need of improvement, and shifting them toward low-carbon “climate smart” technologies is a natural progression. Done right, most of these investments would improve the health, economic vitality, efficiency and livability of cities. Most important, most cities largely avoid the partisan gridlock of our national (and some state) governments, making them an excellent place for making progress.

I agree with Jon that cities are a good place to focus, not only because they have “functioning governments” that aren’t deadlocked, but because they have some key policy levers that can be pulled without a great deal of opposition, without getting a huge number of actors involved (creating potential for gridlock or slow movement), and that could have significant emissions impacts in a short time period.

Here are some of the local climate levers I think we can lean on locally, mostly at the city level.

Community choice aggregation (CCA)

The deregulation of electric utility markets is usually associated with some bad outcomes. However, it can have positive benefits as well. Since July of this year, over 58,000 residents and over 7,000 small business customers in Cleveland have received a 21% savings on their electricity bill AND received electricity from 100% green sources (50% wind, 50% hydro) through the Cleveland Municipal Aggregation Program.

This type of program is made possible by the fact that in deregulated electricity markets, cities can act as bulk purchasers for all or many of their community’s electrical customers. This large buying power allows cities to negotiate good terms – like low rates and high renewable percentages. These programs also don’t require the dismantling or purchasing of local investor-owned utilities. Six states allow CCAs, and to date eight cities have used this authority to secure cleaner, more affordable power for their residents. Most allow customers to opt-out and stay with their existing utility if they choose.

Community solar (solar gardens)

Most people in Minnesota (some say only a third) have a roof that is good for collecting solar energy. Shading, orientation, structural integrity, and ownership structure are just a few of the potential barriers to putting solar on roofs. Matching the demand for solar with the supply of best locations, developed at a large scale for efficiencies, is something community solar or solar gardens can do. These programs could be a powerful climate lever. According to Midwest Energy News:

The idea is to let customers who can’t or don’t want to install solar panels on their own rooftop instead buy individual panels in a nearby solar development. The electricity generated by a customer’s panels is credited to their utility bill as if they were installed on their home or business.

New legislation makes this possible in Minnesota. In Colorado, where the program has been in place since 2012, 9 megawatts of solar was sold out in 30 minutes. That’s roughly the equivalent of 3,000 single family home-sized systems. Time will tell if this demand by project developers translates into strong demand by consumers.

Solar gardens generally require state policy change (except in the case of a municipal or cooperative utility), but don’t require thousands of people making individual installation decisions, hiring contractors, finding financing, etc. A smaller number of experienced installers can do big projects with (theoretically) lower costs, supported by community interest. Customers can buy-in to solar projects at whatever level they choose (usually bound by a minimum and maximum) but can skip all the installation headaches.

Capturing waste heat from the sewer

This one is my favorite. There is a large supply of wasted heat flowing directly beneath our feet all day because we’ve literally flushed it down the drain. One estimate says we’re flushing away 350 billion kWh of energy each year. That’s more than 35 Minneapolis’ worth of energy every year.

Vancouver’s Southeast False Creek Neighborhood Energy Utility

Sewer waste heat recovery systems, or “sewer thermal”, work just like ground-source heat pumps to pre-condition air or water before they are used for heating and cooling (don’t worry, no sewer water or gas gets into your air conditioner). In the Olympic Village neighborhood of Vancouver, sewer waste heat provides 70% of the annual energy demand of a district heating system (natural gas provides the rest). National Geographic has a good overview of the growing attention being paid to sewer thermal.

All major cities have large sewer mains collocated with the highest density development. Tapping this waste heat resource would require digging up those pipes, but it can be done much more easily in conjunction with large new redevelopment projects. And generally, there are few actors: wastewater utilities control the pipes, cities control the right of way.

Making energy use transparent

According to the EPA, the commercial and residential sectors were responsible for 40% of US greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (which is itself responsible for 79 percent of emissions) in 2011. And in most major cities, it’s the large buildings (usually commercial buildings) that are associated with half or more of the energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Making these buildings more energy efficient could be a significant climate lever, but that requires knowing how they are performing now and motivating action from their owners and managers.

Nine cities in the US (and many more internationally) are addressing building energy use by making energy usage information more transparent. Building rating and disclosure policies (typically enacted by cities) require large buildings to use widely adopted benchmarking tools to measure their energy performance, and generally require them to disclose this information, along with a score, to the public.

In New York City, one million residents can now see how much energy and water their apartment buildings consumed. In total, over 2 billion square feet of real estate in New York City is now benchmarking building energy and water performance each year. This information isn’t just for tenants, building owners and managers, real estate professionals, and energy service providers can all use this information to improve the performance of the building stock. In 2012, in their first report on benchmarked buildings, New York City estimated that:

If all comparatively inefficient large commercial buildings were brought up to the median energy use intensity in their category, New York City consum­ers could reduce energy consumption in large buildings by roughly 18% and GHG emissions by 20%. If all large buildings could improve to the 75th percentile, the theoretical savings potential grows to roughly 31% for energy and 33% for GHG emissions. Since large buildings are responsible for 45% of all citywide carbon emissions, this translates into a citywide GHG emissions reduction of 9% and 15% respectively. Much of this improvement could be achieved very cost-effectively through improved operations and maintenance.

An EPA study also showed that buildings doing benchmarking reduce their energy usage. An analysis of 35,000 large buildings over three years showed that these buildings showed a 7 percent average energy savings. Many of these policies are very new (NYC has only reported results for two years), so time will tell how increased public scrutiny of energy performance influences energy use. But ask any building professional, and they will tell you that the first step to improving efficiency is measuring what is currently being used.

LED streetlights

Streetlights typically account for a significant portion of the electricity used by a city government enterprise. For Minneapolis, its 31 percent. Navigant says up to 40% can be typical. Water treatment (for drinking) and wastewater treatment are two other major sources of energy use for cities or regional government entities.

Streetlight retrofits can often be done by a city itself, if they own the lights, or by the utility, which is also sometimes the owner. Retrofits can be quick (a few years), and the paybacks, both in greenhouse gas emissions and cost, can be significant.

These are some examples of “levers” I think can be pulled relatively quickly, and without a great deal of political wrangling. And maybe more importantly, they can be done at the local level, usually by cities. Cities are demonstrating they can and will move on climate, breaking what Jon calls the “cycle of climate inaction”.

There may be other strategies which are essential to addressing climate change, but which require engaging many more stakeholders and/or take significantly more time (an example might be residential building energy retrofits). These strategies may be just as critical, often because they may address issues besides energy and climate – like environmental equity. But if we want to work on a timetable that’s anything close to what they experts call for, we should identify and prioritize these short timeframe, high-impact levers we can pull at home.